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To Obama And Others Of His Ilk: Quit Now!

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  • To Obama And Others Of His Ilk: Quit Now!

    TO OBAMA AND OTHERS OF HIS ILK: QUIT NOW!
    By Ted Rall

    The Japan Times
    June 2 2009

    MIAMI -- We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring
    expectations that accompanied Barack Obama's inauguration and his
    wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical
    memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity
    and follow-through.

    >From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged
    on pledges real and implied.

    So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending,
    of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged
    on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When
    a president doesn't have the grit to annoy the Turks, why does he
    bother to show up for work in the morning?

    Obama is useless. Worse than that, he's dangerous. Which is why,
    if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has
    sat through with corporate contributors, bloodsucking lobbyists and
    corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now -- before he drags us
    further into the abyss.

    Take Obama's plan for "preventive detentions." If a cop or other
    government official thinks you might want to commit a crime
    someday, you could be held in "prolonged detention." Reports in
    U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama's shocking new policy
    would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe
    Islamic terrorists, as well as kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-
    terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. In practice, Obama wants to
    let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying
    off the street.

    Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a
    military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear
    rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather
    than improving people's lives. They worry obsessively over the one
    thing they can't control, what Orwell called "thought crime" --
    contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

    Locking up people who haven't done anything wrong is worse than
    un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of
    Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion
    of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to "preventive
    detention" is an outrage. That the president of the United States,
    a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral
    and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea
    offends the idea of civilization itself.

    Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside
    him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won't follow
    a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed
    himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

    "Prolonged detention," reported The New York Times, would be inflicted
    upon "terrorism suspects who cannot be tried." Interesting choice
    of words.

    Any "terrorism suspect" (can you be a suspect if you haven't
    been charged with a crime?) can be tried. Anyone can be tried for
    anything. At this writing, a Somali child is sitting in a prison in
    New York, charged with piracy in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. has
    no jurisdiction. Anyone can be tried.

    What they mean, of course, is that the hundreds of men and boys
    languishing at Guantanamo and the thousands of "detainees" the
    Obama Administration anticipates kidnapping in the future cannot be
    convicted. As in the old Soviet Union, putting enemies of the state
    on trial isn't enough. The game has to be fixed. Conviction has to
    be a foregone conclusion.

    Why is it, exactly, that some prisoners "cannot be tried?"

    The Old Gray Lady explains why Obama wants this "entirely new chapter
    in American law" in a boring little sentence buried past the jump
    and a couple of hundred words down page A16: "Yet another question is
    what to do with the most problematic group of Guantanamo detainees:
    those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted,
    either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted."

    In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that
    people against whom there is a "lack of evidence" are innocent. They
    walk free.

    In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly
    free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power,
    "tainted evidence" is no evidence at all.

    If you can't prove that a defendant committed a crime -- an actual
    crime, not a thought crime -- in a fair trial, you release him and
    apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.
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